Sexuality In Jamaica Kincaid's Girl

Inspired by her childhood in destitute, colonial Antigua, Jamaica Kincaid wrote Girl as a means to write about the culture she grew up in. As a means to detail, if not subtly derail, the society’s demonization of female sexuality and “liberation” through domestic skills, the author employs at points crude diction, a run on syntax, and submissive characterization. The prattling syntax begins promptly in this selection and continues throughout largely as a means of smothering to indoctrinate the freedom of learning domestic skills. The first sentence begins, “Wash the white clothes on Monday...wash the color clothes on Tuesday….” (Kincaid 914). Again on the same page, the author writes “...this is how you iron your Father’s khaki pants...this is how you grow okra….” Given the poverty and lack of mobility in Antigua, it is not surprising the girl’s mother sees learning skills such as laundry and cooking as the only way her daughter will ever be successful in life and she strives passionately to indoctrinate the feeling in her daughter. …show more content…
Several times throughout, the mother chides her daughter against becoming “the slut you are so bent on becoming” (Kincaid 914). Assuming the daughter is rather young here as she plays marbles frequently, the word choice of “slut” is evocative and threatening. It is more than mere guidance, it plays up sexuality as evil. In other words, the mother scold her daughter for being the “kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread” (Kincaid 915). This is important because it highlights femininity isn’t just corrupt of its own but also due to its sociocultural connotations. To be openly sexual is to defy social norms, to be an outcast, and to virtually be a citizen